We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
“As we stand here today, closer to the brink of nuclear annihilation than ever before, political elite warmongers are carelessly fomenting fear and tension between nuclear powers. Perhaps it is because they are confident that they will have access to nuclear shelters for themselves and for their families that regular people won’t have access to. So, it’s up to us, the people, to speak up and demand an end to this madness.”
-Tulsi Gabbard, Director of National Intelligence
Who are these “political elite warmongers” that are “carelessly fomenting fear and tension between nuclear powers”? You know how it is. Rich people just love wiping out civilization. It is what rich people live for. And that is why we need socialism, so we can eat the rich and be done with them!
But seriously, Tulsi Gabbard is a demagogue ready to blame nuclear war on some imaginary bunch of rich people, appealing to envy and resentment. Meanwhile, our domestic socialists are ready to burn the country down because they had their heads filled with Marxist sewage in school. What idiot believes that elite Americans are threatening the world with nuclear war? But then, Tulsi Gabbard is part of the political elite, and she most certainly has a bomb shelter. Or did I miss something?
But wait! Tulsi Gabbard is also America’s Director of National Intelligence. Does her rhetoric belong to America and NATO, or does it belong to the socialist camp? What on earth just came out of her mouth?
The prevailing narrative in Net Zero ideology is one of a seamless “clean energy transition”. The reality is that their supposedly necessary transition is unlike any in human history because it represents a move down the energy density ladder. Properly understood, the proposal is terrifying.
It’s terrifying because it violates the “Iron Law Of Energy Transition”: successful civilisations always move toward more concentrated, more reliable power sources. Every historical example of a move down the energy density ladder has been involuntary. And every involuntary move down the energy density ladder has produced a mass casualty event.
If wimmins are currently underpaid in our capitalist bastardy patriarchalist society then it must be possible, today, to deliberately and specifically hire women and make a fortune.
So, is it? Anyone at all got any idea of where we might do that? Which sector etc? Anyone able to see anyone doing that?
Ah, then wimmins is not underpaid in our patriarchalist society of capitalist bastardry, are they? Because if they were the capitalist bastards would be doing a Dame Stevie.
“We live with the risk of injury or death in every other human endeavor, from mountain climbing to skydiving, from driving to flying. But for some reason, space-related activities are held to a different standard. Why is it that we see the death of test pilots as an unfortunate consequence of their job, but not for astronauts?”
– Rand Simberg, Safe Is Not An Option: Overcoming The Futile Obsession With Getting Everyone Back Alive That Is Killing Our Expansion Into Space. The book was published in 2013, around a time when Elon Musk and his SpaceX business, as well as others, was not quite as in our public consciousness as it is now. Published 12 years ago, the book retains much of its power and persuasiveness, and lessons apply far beyond spaceflight. Simberg is one of the early bloggers out there, like Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit.
P.S. Before sharing this article with your friends and family, please be aware that the Government’s Prevent anti-radicalisation programme has recently declared that concern about mass immigration is “terrorist ideology”. A Prevent training course hosted on the Government’s website lists “cultural nationalism” as something that could cause you to be referred for deradicalisation.
Prevent, you’ll remember, is the programme to which the Southport murderer Axel Rudakubana was repeatedly referred from as young as 13. He went on to stab a number of children and adults, 3 of whom died.
Usman Khan, the terrorist who committed the London Bridge attack in 2019, was under Prevent monitoring when he carried out his attack in the middle of a prisoner rehabilitation event for which he had travelled to London. Prevent officers tasked with monitoring him had “no specific training” in dealing with terrorists.
According to the Prevent training guidance, if you believe that “Western culture is under threat from mass migration and a lack of integration by certain ethnic and cultural groups” you will be referred to the very programme which failed to deal with them.
What is happening today, it seems, is that the entire population of the UK is in the midst of realizing that whether a controversial idea may be safely expressed depends, in large part, on the hearer, and not the speaker.
Current law fails the rule-of-law test:
the law hands police and magistrates wide discretionary powers to decide which viewpoints are acceptable, depending on the social or political mood at the time and on the ground.
Legislation can not seem to fix the problem:
Because every legislative fix proposed in recent years has failed to address the root problem: the doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty. This is the idea that the King-in-Parliament wields unlimited power with no guardrails, and has long been a foundational principle of British constitutional order. The British state does not concede the existence of any legal limits on its own authority. Individual rights have become casualties of rigid adherence to this ancient doctrine, which, plainly, no longer serves the interests of the society it governs.
Byrne goes on to argue that the application of speech laws has changed over time due to fashion. The only real solution to that is absolute free speech like that granted by the US First Amendment.
Encouragingly, in 2025, wearing a mask in shops, leisure facilities, workplaces or on public transport is for the most part confined to a tiny minority. Alas, the exception to this return of sanity is the health and social care sector, where a few pro-mask ideologues residing in the infection control departments recurringly succeed in muzzling their staff, patients and visitors. While these pockets of fanaticism exist, there is always a danger that – fuelled by the contagion of safetyism – the imposition of mask requirements can re-ignite across all community settings. With this in mind, on this five-year anniversary of the first UK mask mandates, the campaign group Smile Free is about to release a short film, Masking Humanity, in which health and social care experts vividly convey the enormous harms of masks in these settings. Please help to spread the word to assist in the mission to keep blanket masking out of health and social care.
And Hermer’s characterisation of historical events is in any case cobblers, of course. International law did not stop the actual honest-to-goodness Nazis first time around; American industry and Soviet manpower did that. The idea that if only we had had the ECHR in 1933 all of the unpleasantness of World War Two and the Holocaust could have been avoided is, to put it politely, absurd. One doesn’t constrain a belligerent regime through an ‘international rules-based system’; one does it through force, or the threat of it.
In Ms Harvey’s universe – occupied by the likes of Corrêa do Lago, Greenpeace and the UK’s very own ‘Mad Ed’, the Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero – the science is settled, the energy transition is an imperative and decarbonisation will not only save the planet from an impending environmental catastrophe but also bring about economic growth and prosperity. Harvey’s article hinges on the tired assertion that the science of climate change is settled, with a ‘97% consensus’ among scientists that human activity drives catastrophic global warming. This figure, derived from John Cook’s 2013 study, has been debunked repeatedly for its methodological flaws — most notably by scholars like David Legates, who found that only a tiny fraction of the studied papers explicitly endorsed the catastrophic narrative.
Ukraine secretly delivered FPV drones and wooden mobile cabins into Russia. The drones were hidden under the roofs of the cabins, which were later mounted on trucks.
At the signal, the roofs opened remotely. Dozens of drones launched directly from the trucks, striking strategic bomber aircraft.
And — Russia can’t produce these bombers anymore. The loss is massive.
Nothing like this has ever been done before.
In one sense, of course, it has been done before. The military history of the twentieth century contains many examples of large numbers of planes being destroyed on their airfields – by the Japanese at Pearl Harbour, by the Germans at the beginning of Operation Barbarossa, and by the Israelis in the first hours of the Six Day War, to name but three.
But such damage being done by itty bitty little drones that were considered little more than toys a few years ago is new.
As AJP Taylor once wrote, “until August 1914 a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state beyond the post office and the policeman”.
That is emphatically not the case today. Having won the wars, the advocates of freedom comprehensively lost the peace. They lost to such a degree that those of us born and raised afterwards find it hard to comprehend the scale of the change.
It’s easiest to start with the size of the state. To be sure, socialism in Britain has receded from its high point. The nationalisation of coal, iron, steel, electricity, gas, roads, aviation, telecommunications, and railways has been mostly undone, although steel and rail are on the way back in.
But by comparison to our pre-war starting point, we live in a nearly unrecognisable country. In 1913, taxes and spending took up around 8 per cent of GDP. Today, they account for 35 per cent and 45 per cent respectively. To put it another way, almost half of all economic activity in Britain involves funds allocated at the behest of the government, and over half of British adults rely on the state for major parts of their income.
And if anything, this understates the degree of government control. Outcomes which are nominally left to the market are rigged by a state which sees prices as less as a way for markets to clear, and more as a tool for social engineering.
The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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